The way the subject is understood in poststructuralism sees discourse as enabling and constraining the agency of the subject. This paper explores this notion in some autobiographical texts of Derrida, and considers the extent to which it features in the work of Busch and Pavlenko on autobiographical narratives of multilinguals.
Autobiographical narratives of language experience and language use raise the issue of the agency of the subject. Poststructuralist accounts of the subject stress the role of sociocultural mediation represented by discourse in our capacity to act. If, according to Foucault (1977), the subject is an effect of discourse, then agency is made possible within discourse, not outside it. There is thus a paradox in agency: on the one hand, sociocultural mediation is enabling (it creates the conditions of possibility of acting); on the other hand, sociocultural mediation acts as a constraint. The approach to understanding agency which we find in the work of Foucault (1977) and Butler (1997), a capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create, is evident in the autobiographical material in some of the later works of Jacques Derrida. To what extent is this poststructuralist account of agency reflected in applied linguistics research on autobiographical narratives in the context of multilingualism? This paper explores the nature of agency in subjectivity, and its implications for interpreting the autobiographical narratives of multilingual subjects.
